Andrew Gregory and Casey McIntyre: A YouTube Comedy Star and the Woman Who Keeps Him Laughing

In love, as in comedy, impeccable timing is everything. Yet there is something to be said for the offbeat, and even the missed beat, when it comes to great romance.

Andrew Gregory, 33, a member of the Gregory Brothers, a comedic, music-oriented YouTube hitmaker, is funny for a living. He’s a bearded redhead with a wholesome open grin, and was raised in Radford, Va., population about 16,000.

Casey McIntyre, 30, who grew up in Tenafly, N.J., and whom friends describe as “more city” than Mr. Gregory, is the associate publisher of Razorbill, a young-adult and middle-grade book imprint of Penguin Random House in New York. She is polished by day and kooky by night.

A week beforetheir wedding, they were awakened by a thunderstorm, which inspired Ms. McIntyre to channel one of the von Trapp children in “The Sound of Music” film and say to Mr. Gregory, “I’m scared.”

He responded in the voice of Maria (Julie Andrews), belting out the song “My Favorite Things.”

“How could I not?” asked Mr. Gregory.

“There’s a language that goes on between the two of them that no one else is privy to,” said Christine Federman, a friend who lives in Lawrence, Kan.

In many ways, their relationship bears all the hallmarks of a classic Hollywood screwball comedy, with madcap routines and preposterous shenanigans.

For instance, when the couple lie cuddled in their customary head-to-toe position while watching television in their Brooklyn apartment, they say, she is apt to pretend to be a switchboard operator, using his feet as telephones — “shifting rather rapidly from left to right,” said Mr. Gregory, especially when call volume is high.

“We like to play games,” said Ms. McIntyre, who regularly beats him at Scrabble and outwits him at more surrealistic games of their own making, like Fish, Not a Dead Fish, an obscure handshake maneuver.

“When around each other, they are constantly grinning like idiots,” said the groom’s older brother, Evan Gregory, who rounds out the Gregory Brothers with his wife, Sarah Fullen Gregory, and the youngest Gregory brother, Michael.

“They’ve got sparks in the eyes for each other, this electricity,” said Erin Leigh Schmoyer, a friend in Brooklyn as well as regular attendee of their game nights.

Yet, their courtship has not been without glitches and heartache, including a breakup.

They were introduced on an October morning in 2011, at a Starbucks in TriBeCa, by one of Ms. McIntyre’s associates at Penguin Random House.

“He was really charming, and I was really intrigued,” Ms. McIntyre said.

He remembered thinking she was gorgeous, and “so bright, so sweet, down to earth and very practical.”

She was different from the women he had previously dated, according to his friend Gabriel Rogers. When he and Mr. Gregory were students at Swarthmore College, studying religions, he said, his pal had been drawn to “free-spirited, globe-trotting girls, who ended up being painful to his earnest heart.” He added that Ms. McIntyre “cured him of his hippie predilection.”

A few days after the initial meeting, they were on their first real date, playing skee ball and having drinks at Full Circle Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On subsequent dates, he was prone to doing “Southernly gentlemanly things,” she said, like presenting her with a bouquet of Gerbera daisies. “His mother raised him right,” Ms. McIntyre said.

Mr. Gregory soon bestowed upon his sweetheart a pseudo-villainous-sounding name, Babyfist, inspired by the way she deformed toothpaste tubes, grabbing them in the center with reckless zeal, “the way a baby would,” he said.

He said he never knows beforehand when her Babyfist persona will emerge. It may be on a hot subway, when she’ll whip out one of her little wooden fans, “quite dramatically, with great excitement,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Gregory balances his jokiness with a conscious effort to live in the here and now. “Mindfulness is something Andrew practices in his daily life, and it’s reflected in his demeanor,” she said. “He’s happy and he’s present.”

His ability to maintain focus allows him to seize upon an Internet or newspaper item, and with the use of Auto-Tuning, a lot of songwriting and a variety of performers — in collaboration with the other Gregory Brothers — he turns it into a full-scale video production, complete with song, dance, bizarre characters and chorus. They call the process “songifying.”

“Mindfulness is really helpful in your creative work,” said Mr. Gregory, who deepened his studies when he took a semester off from college and went to a retreat at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the south of France.

There’s even humor to be found in that. One afternoon, after many weeks of formal teachings, Mr. Gregory had an unexpected encounter with Thich Nhat Hanh, the founder of the monastery. The monk came through a door, looked at Mr. Gregory meaningfully and intoned, “It is time.”

It seemed so stunningly auspicious, Mr. Gregory said, like a “parody of a moment in a kung fu movie.” Until he realized the teacher meant it was time for a meal, and then walked with him arm in arm to lunch.

But by September 2012, his timing was out of sync with Ms. McIntyre’s. She was ready to move things forward. “I didn’t want to go steady forever,” she said.

She thought that if there was any possibility of moving in together, they should be engaged.

He wasn’t ready for that: “In my mind, we were both really young, so let’s just see how it goes. It was a time of tension.”

They had been talking about taking a trip in January, but when Ms. McIntyre brought it up, “he said he wasn’t sure we should plan it.” That was the deciding moment for her. “My stomach kind of dropped and I just hurt. The next time we talked, Andrew said I want to still see you, and I said no.”

They remained apart for nine months.

Ms. McIntyre had a good cry with her mother and listened to a lot of Ani DiFranco and Florence and the Machine. She took Zumba and yoga classes, and had her moments of “Ben and Jerry’s on the couch, watching ‘Real Housewives,’ ” she said.

The decision he had made (or didn’t make) was not sitting that well with Mr. Gregory, and no amount of late-night snacking and TV bingeing would make it go away. “Right away, I began to know that it was a bad, panicked choice,” he said.

Ms. McIntyre was moving on, and in June 2013 took a solo apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, which she decorated with art from Etsy and antique pieces she painted in Candy Land colors.

Meanwhile, Mr. Gregory was eating so much chocolate ice cream that he had to go to the doctor to be treated for acid reflux. “After sitting on it for months, it was like, ‘Too bad, buddy, you really messed up,’ ” Mr. Gregory told himself, not the first in the series of a tormented inner monologues.

“He couldn’t stop thinking about her,” Mr. Rogers said.

After six months or so, Mr. Gregory made his big move: randomly “favoriting” her tweets.

“I was very much not into it,” she said. “I had a cool apartment, was traveling to cool places and working on some exciting projects. I was in a good place.”

Eventually, he got up the nerve to ask to see her. She agreed to meet him in Prospect Park, thinking she may get closure. They met at the entrance to the park and walked around for an hour, not holding hands. She wore a stylish blue maxidress and dangly earrings.

She still loved him, but was guarded. “I knew if we were to reconcile, things would have to be different,” she said.

By the end of the summer, she had succumbed to his earnest pursuit, and began what would be a year of hitting art shows, spending time with their families and hunting for an apartment.

“When they were back, they were back 150 percent,” said Ms. Federman, Ms. McIntyre’s friend.

In August 2014, when Mr. Gregory invited her to join him for a night picnic in Prospect Park — something they had often done — Ms. McIntyre suspected nothing.

“Andrew started being really sweet, and then getting really quiet,” she said. He asked if she would be his wife. They went back to his apartment and slow-danced.

On the day of their wedding, July 18, at Onteora Mountain House in Boiceville, N.Y., the groom stood with the wedding party, wearing a floral tie from Etsy and a gray Hugo Boss suit, against a backdrop of majestic mountains.

A standing-room-only crowd of about 200 guests had gathered in anticipation as Ruth Blackwell Rogers, a close friend of the couple, prepared to lead them in their vows, with the Rev. Jeanne Stark of Hudson Valley Interfaith Ministry handling the legal paperwork.

There was no vocal distortion, no dancing ballerinas or choruses of the type featured in Gregory Brothers productions — only the groom, with an adoring light in his eyes, and the bride, classically beautiful in an Aire Barcelona ball-gown-style dress, on the arm of her father, descending the tree-lined outdoor staircase, her blue suede pumps peeking out beneath her hem.

As the ceremony moved along, the sky rumbled with the possibility of storm. Now, as the monk had said years ago, it really was time.

Details The bride supplied all the guests with wooden folding fans like those she tends to whip out on hot subways. Her all-white bouquet was composed of freesias, lilies of the valley, hyacinths and stephanotis. The rain held off until after drinks and game-playing on the lawn, and all of the guests were safely under the reception tent. Twenty minutes later, a rainbow appeared.

Funny business During the ceremony, there was a marked absence of tomfoolery from the rest of the Gregory Brothers, except for the moment when the officiant, Ruth Blackwell Rogers, was expecting a ring and Evan Gregory instead slipped his baby daughter’s pacifier into her palm — out of a burning curiosity, he later said, about how she would react. “Her eyes grew as big as saucers,” he recalled. Only a few members of the wedding party noticed.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page ST12 of the New York edition with the headline: A Perfect Pairing of Romantic and Comedic Timing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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